This time of year, we see graduation speeches popping up all over the web. The commencement address as a genre focuses on the opportunities, challenges, and responsibilities graduates will face post-college, and often espouses timeless life lessons and philosophies. But this year, as you may have seen, esteemed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns took the opportunity of his graduation speech, presented to the 2016 class at Stanford University, to address the timeliest of issues: the upcoming presidential election and the threat of "an incipient proto-fascism." The graduation just happened to fall on the same day as the deadliest mass-shooting in recent American history.

Voters are angry at the system, we're told again and again, and frankly the overwhelming majority of us have every reason to be. But anger can be intoxicating, and the segment of the electorate that carried Donald Trump to power seems drunk with rage and hostility. The promise of Trumpism puts me in mind of historian and critic Richard Slotkin’s classic study of U.S. mythology, Regeneration Through Violence, which describes the nation's compulsion to purge the country of threatening others in order to restore some myth of lost innocence. "I will give you everything, I'm the only one," the candidate vows, while scapegoating group after group for the country's problems.

In his Stanford commencement speech on Sunday, Burns decried “the dictatorial tendencies of the candidate with zero experience in the much maligned but subtle art of governance; who is against lots of things, but doesn’t seem to be for anything, offering only bombastic and contradictory promises and terrifying Orwellian statements." The Republican candidate for president is "a person,” Burns said in his impassioned speech, “who easily lies, creating an environment where truth doesn’t seem to matter.”

As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African-Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber-rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong. These are all virulent strains that have at times infected us in the past. But they now loom in front of us again — all happening at once. We know from our history books that these are the diseases of ancient and now fallen empires. The sense of commonwealth, of shared sacrifice, of trust, so much a part of American life, is eroding fast, spurred along and amplified by an amoral internet that permits a lie to circle the globe three times before the truth can get started.

We no longer have the luxury of neutrality or “balance,” or even of bemused disdain. Many of our media institutions have largely failed to expose this charlatan, torn between a nagging responsibility to good journalism and the big ratings a media circus always delivers. In fact, they have given him the abundant airtime he so desperately craves, so much so that it has actually worn down our natural human revulsion to this kind of behavior. Hey, he’s rich; he must be doing something right. He is not. Edward R. Murrow would have exposed this naked emperor months ago. He is an insult to our history. Do not be deceived by his momentary “good behavior.” It is only a spoiled, misbehaving child hoping somehow to still have dessert.

And do not think that the tragedy in Orlando underscores his points. It does not. We must “disenthrall ourselves,” as Abraham Lincoln said, from the culture of violence and guns. And then “we shall save our country.”

The words of Lincoln that Burns quotes come from the president’s annual remarks to congress in 1862, in which Lincoln made the case for the Emancipation Proclamation, one month before signing it. (A document, ironically, that Slotkin says "radically expanded the existing powers of the presidency" in its pursuit of a just cause.) In his address, Lincoln makes a forceful moral argument, all the more eloquent for its characteristic brevity.

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.

Likewise, Burns—addressing future leaders at an elite institution—makes his case for heeding the lessons of history, considering posterity, and rejecting Trump, independent of partisan interests: “This is not a liberal or conservative issue, a red state-blue state divide. This is an American issue.” He also implores "those 'Vichy Republicans' who have endorsed him to please, please reconsider." The horrific mass murder in Orlando has further inflamed what Burns calls “the troubling, unfiltered Tourette’s of [Trump’s] tribalism”---with renewed calls for bans on all Muslims, more inflammatory insinuations that the president colludes with terrorists, and bizarre allegations that a Clinton aide is a Saudi agent.

Trump did not invent this rhetoric of bigotry, conspiracy, and paranoia, but he has manipulated and exploited it more effectively than anyone else, to potentially disastrous effect. "The next few months of your 'commencement,'" Burns says, "that is to say, your future, will be critical to the survival of our republic." He urges the graduating Stanford class to take action: “before you do anything with your well-earned degree, you must do everything you can to defeat the retrograde forces that have invaded our democratic process.” Those processes may already be deeply compromised by moneyed interests, but destroying the edifice on which they're built, Burns suggests, will hardly restore any supposedly lost "greatness." Watch Burns' full commencement speech above.

Comments (8)

I’m really sorry to see that you changed from a nice cultural website that i followed with pleasure for years, to another stupid left-wing vuvuzela.Good luck with that but not with me anymore on board. 28 years under a real communist regime made me really allergic to this lefties candies.

I guess the National Review is also a “left-wing vuvuzela”? This candidate’s own party fears and dislikes him. He is a dangerous, unstable person with totalitarian tendencies. Loads of people on the right have said just as much and continue to say it.

I am no Trump fan, but I have to laugh at the hypocrisy of the left. Mr. Burns decries the Republican candidate as one “who easily lies, creating an environment where truth doesn’t seem to matter.” Do you think, Mr. Burns, that your statement might also apply to the Democratic candidate (think Benghazi, breaches of U.S. security protocol regarding electronic communications, etc.)?

For those who bemoan the voter anger that manifested itself in a Trump, recall that such dissatisfaction arose during eight years under the Administration of President “Hope and Change”.

What a courageous stand! Instead of trying to give a real, welcome speech to graduates going proudly into the world, Ken Burns uses his time to politic for Hillary Clinton, who if you listen to him, is as pure as the driven snow! Amazing that within a day, a terrorist attack on Anerican soil claimed 50 lives, but we are supposed to beware of Donald Trump. I’ll hold my breath and wait for Ken Burns to give a speech denouncing radical Islamic terrorists.

I like your prophetic tone. I humbly discuss always about the past and how is it affecting the present, never daring to guess about the future events, so i’ll stop here. But sincerely and again, thanks for all the intellectual pleasure that you gave me for all this years. I’m just allergic to leftist crap and i didn’t expect to find it here. But still, it’s your right (or left) bro. Good luck with it.

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.